LAPPS/Galaxy Workflow Engine
Initially developed for genomics research, Galaxy is a scientific workflow system which is largely domain agnostic. The LAPPS Grid instantiation of the Galaxy Workflow Engine provides LAPPS Grid users with a user-friendly interface to create workflows defining a sequence of steps in an analysis, evaluate results, and share results with other researchers.
Tool and Data Discovery
Browse and search the tools and data available in the LAPPS Grid. This provides the jumping-off point for further analysis using the LAPPS Grid Galaxy Workflow Engine.
Interoperability
Web services in the LAPPS Grid communicate via emerging standards for web service interchange of linguistic objects. This allows communication among tools with different input and output formats as well as tools and components from frameworks such as UIMA and GATE. The LAPPS Grid is therefore a “meta-platform” through which users can combine previously incompatible tools, workflows, and other NLP components to create customized applications that best suit their needs.
Evaluation
A unique feature of the LAPPS Grid is the inclusion of sophisticated tools for evaluation based on the Open Advancement approach used in IBM’s Jeopardy-winning Watson. Results from entire workflows as well as individual tools and components are reported and can be used in iterative development in order to achieve optimum performance. Workflows and results are persisted and can be shared with other researchers for reuse and replication of results.
Accessibility
Accessible to non-technical researchers via pre-composed workflows, stored protocols, and interactive GUIs, while retaining capacity for more sophisticated analyses. Using the Galaxy interface, users can easily and intuitively compose their own workflows using drag-and-drop.
LAPPS Grid development is funded by US National Science Foundation Office of CyberInfrastructure SI2-SSI 1147944 and SI2-SSI 1147912.